I am experimenting with synching a few albums to my usb hard drive. I like the handheld interface and all the options available (where you want audio/images/video files to be put etc.)
I also like the fact that it'll delete stuff from the portable drive if its not in my synch playlist.
I can set up a copy of media center somewhere else, with just one watch folder (my usb drive) and it should pick up just the music on there. If that library is set up with a copy of the cover art directory too (I'll do that manually) then it should all work pretty smoothly.
I have a half question, half feature request though. (As if I'd post for anything else).
I noticed that you can set where the "database" file is placed. I assume that's unecessary for a usb hard drive???, since mine is synching now no problems, without my having defined a place for the database file.
My feature request would be to leverage the use of that database file for "pretend" handhelds (ie. usb hard drives).
In theory, couldnt MC create a database file on a usb hard drive, and that database file be told to keep a record of just certain tag fields. For example, the "Ratings", "Artist" "Album" "Lyrics" etc. (Maybe we could tick the ones we want watched). Then, on the next synch, MC would read the files and if any of that tag info has changed, then it would be returned to the files in the main library.
This would be really powerful. My use of this feature stems from the fact that i access my library using library server from work, which is great for just listening to songs. But it's not so good for listening to new music, because you cant rate the songs you like, or make minor tag info changes. If I could synch just my new and not so wonderfully tagged music onto my little usb drive, then I could listen to that music using a local library at work, and make tag changes to those files, and then once I get home, those changes could be synched to the real music files on my main system.
Author
Topic: Synching to portable drive (Read 1201 times)